Holly sees the little girl run up our stairs

This morning Holly and I were in the kitchen making breakfast. All the kids were just sent upstairs for being annoying. Ten minutes later Holly asked me, "Did one of the kids just go upstairs?"

I had not heard anything, and told Holly as much. Normally a teenage girl going quickly up the stairs sounds like a herd of elephants charging. I went to the landing of the stairs and looked up. All the girls were in their respective rooms with the doors shut.

I asked Holly what was going on.

"I just saw a little girl dressed in white run up the stairs."

Nice. This is the second sighting of this little girl is less than thirty days. Shelby saw this same girl on the stairway landing last month.

The little girl lets the cat out

Each one of my daughters has a cat. And each one of those cats live full time in their respective owner's bedrooms. When you have 3 dogs and 3 cats, and the two species don't really mix, you have to draw political lines. Therefore, the cats live upstairs and the dogs downstairs.

Last Friday [12/4/2009], my wife went into Shelby's room, a location that has hosted some activity in the past, to give Shelby's cat Smokey, some water. She did that task without incident and when she finished, Holly remembers closing the door.

Now closing the door is essential with cats in these rooms because if you don't close the door, the cats venture out of their rooms and wander downstairs and by crossing the set political line, become fair game for the dogs, causing all sorts of ruckus and chaos. (Why Holly was watering the cat and not Shelby is a cause for further discussion that is beyond the scope of this blog.)

About fifteen minutes later, Holly and the girls were downstairs talking about their day,. The dogs started running over to the stair landing and barking. This caused everyone in the room to look over at the stair landing to see Smokey peeking his head through the rails and looking at everyone in the room.

Shelby also saw something else: she saw a little girl also looking through the rails at everyone in the room. Shelby saw that the girl has long brown hair and a pale face, but little else since Shelby was looking at her across the room and through a set of bannister rails. And then she was gone.

No one besides Shelby saw the girl.

Theory on residual hauntings

Many of the paranormal experts seem to thing residual haunting are like VCR tapes. They are energy memories that play out over and over again. For example, if someone sees an apparition that walks through a wall, the experts label that as a residual haunting because at some point in history there was most likely a door or a portal of some kind where people used to walk through.

I have a problem with this explanation. What causes these "memories" to trigger? Where is the memory even stored? Where does the energy needed to manifest such phenomena come from? It seems too random and I don't accept the "it just happens" answers.

In July 2009, my oldest daughter Sarah saw an apparition. It was a farmer that was walking up our hill, next to the driveway. She watched him until he basically walked into a large bush and disappeared. The fact that he did not try to avoid the bush means he would be classified as residual activity.

This got me thinking long and hard about residual hauntings. Here is my theory: residual hauntings are memories of events that the spririt is remembering at that moment. Have you ever day dreamed or remembered something that happened in your past? I believe spirits still have this ability, and remember things that happened in their past life.

And the moment they remember it, the memory actually takes physical form, playing out in the exact spot that the actual event occured in the past. Imagine if you could store your memories, then play them like a hologram any time you wanted. I think spirits have this ability.

Sarah sees a farmer walk through our yard

Yes, I know. It's been a long time. Really, there's been nothing significant to report. I still have to get the remaining night recordings up on the sight, but work has been keeping me very busy, and to be honest, I want to spend as little time on the computer when I get home as possible.

But last night, something significant did happen. The rain was coming down in sporadic torrents. There was lightning aplenty, even when it wasn't raining.

The entire family was spending an evening together, watching a re-run of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on ABC Family. We ate dinner in front of the TV, made popcorn, and even baked cookies. At some point Sarah realized she didn't know where her Zune was and went out the back door to look for it. A few minutes later she was frantically knocking at the back door.

Initially I thought nothing of it because earlier that day one of the other girls was complaining that the door knob gets stuck. I assumed Sarah was going through the same problem. A bit irritated, I yelled at her through the door, "It's open, just turn the handle."

It only took a few seconds before she did get the doorknob unstuck. When she walked in it was obvious something had spooked her. She explained she was on the back deck and saw a "farmer" walking up the hill in the rain through our property. It was light enough that she saw what he was wearing, and that he had a straw hat on, and that a piece of straw was sticking out of his mouth. He was skinny, wearing a a old white tank top, and ratty pants that looked like old blue jeans that were cut off and only came down to his knees. He was also bare foot.

She saw him walk up the hill for about 3 seconds, then he disappeared. This freaked her out enough to make a beeline for the back door. I went outside with her and made her explain in great detail where she saw this farmer, what he looked like. She stood on the deck and I walked over to where she said he was, and faced the direction she claimed he was walking. I was only 10 feet away from a huge overgrown cluster of bushes and brambles. He would have walked straight into this mess before he disappeared.

Sophia sees a white figure at the top of the stairs

We are having our good friends Jean and Ray over tonight to celebrate New Years. So everyone is busy around the house cleaning up and tidying things.

One of the biggest and most constant fights is dog hair. With two dogs that shed, there is always hair, and since we have dark carpets, it's always noticable.

I had tasked Shelby and Sophia to vaccum the stairs, since they are both in their 'tweens, one holds the big heavy vacuum while the other handles the hose and actually sucks up the hair and debris.

I was downstairs sweeping the kitchen floor when Shelby walked up to me and said that Sophia just saw the same white "thing" that Shelby had seen a few weeks ago. I asked Sophia what she saw, and she replied that she looked up once and saw something white standing there, and saw the round shape of a head, but it disappeared.

Shelby sees something white peek around the corner at her

The girls are home for Thanksgiving this week. They were all downstairs watching TV in the family room. I had went upstairs for something and was on my way back down to the basement to continue working when Shelby stopped me.

I'll recreate the conversation I had with her from memory.

"I just saw something white peek out of the bathroom door at me," she said. Her voice was low, almost whispering like she didn't want the whatever she just saw to hear her.

"You did? Are you sure it wasn't your imagination playing tricks on you?"

"Yes. I saw it out of the corner of my eye, and when I turned to look, it ducked back into the bathroom."

I just nodded and said, "Well, you know funny stuff goes on around here."

What am I supposed to tell her? She's seeing things? She's getting too old for that. I don't want her to start questioning her own sanity at 11!

White Vortexes

I just took Bobby, our runt Jack Russel Terrier, out to his runner. To get there I go down the steps of our porch, hang a left, then walk across some stone steps I laid on the grass until I get to the cable which is is runner. If you take a look at the image of my house, you can see it's on the hill. So while I am going out to the runner, the hill drops away on my right.

While I was carrying him, the peripheral vision of my right eye was completely obscured by a white opaque... thing. It was like a small cloud came hovering by the corner of my eye. I quickly turned my head to the right, and it disappeared. I was reminded of pictures I had seen of vortexes, and this looked exactly like one.

I quickly turned my head back to make sure I was not going to step off the stones, and then the white vortex appeared again in the same place, obscuring the peripheral vision of my right eye. And then it was gone.

I finished hooking Bobby up to his runner, and went back into the house, pondering how strange this experience was. I've never seen anything like that before, and it hasn't happened since.

I catch a glimpse of the little girl

Last night, Holly and I had went to bed, and I was watching TV until I fell asleep (this is a better alternative than laying in bed in the dark and listening to the sound of something walking around in your room and making noises).

The TV is located to the right of the master bathroom doorway. The bathroom was dark, and the lights were off in my room, so the entire room was lit only by the light of the TV.

I was watching TV, and caught movement in the bathroom doorway with my peripheral vision. By the time I looked over at the doorway it was gone, but I'm almost positive what I caught in my peripheral vision was the shape of a little girl, stepping into the doorway quickly to see if I was still awake, then quickly stepping backwards into the darkness of the bathroom.

Shelby awakens to find a little girl standing over her bed

There hasn't been a lot of time to go over EVP recordings this month - the new job is really keeping me busy.

But this morning two things happened. I was working at my computer before anyone woke and just happened to look over at Holly sleeping. Movement at the side of the bed near the floor caught my eye. A section of the comforter was touching the floor and was flapping quickly, as if there was air blowing from underneath. I had to look at this for a few seconds because I wasn’t sure if there was a concrete reason why it was doing this. Then I realized that there was no way it could be doing it, as no heater registers were near that part of the bed. Then it stopped a few seconds later.

About thirty minutes later I woke up Shelby and Sophia for school. Shelby still sleeps with Sophia, and refuses to sleep in her own room after the incident in her room last month.

Shelby told me that she woke up during the night to see a girl approximately their age standing over their bed. I asked her if it was Sophia, and she said no, because she had immediately looked at Sophia next to her in bed and saw that Sophia was asleep, When she looked back to where the girl was, she was gone. Shelby described the girl as “looking like Sophie” but with much longer hair. She could not see her face “it was all like a shadow” but could see the outline of her hair.

This confirms our idea that one of the spirits here is a little girl.

I see a shadowy figure "fly" up the hill

Ok, so all married couples fight, Holly and I included. And one night a few months ago we were fighting. I needed to get away from the situation so we could both cool off, but I didn't want to drive anywhere.

So I sat in my truck in the driveway and listened to some gaming podcasts. It was just past twilight, almost completely dark. It was to the point that if I were inside the house with the lights on, it would look like it was completely dark outside.

At one point I looked to my left up the hill towards the neighbor’s house behind us, and saw what I can only describe as someone wearing a black cape “floating” very fast up the hill. The “cape” was billowing behind the figure. I thought it was a kid in a Dracula cape running up the hill but it was moving WAY too fast, and there were no legs visible.

In a few seconds in was gone and I knew it was an apparition I just saw, outside of the house.

It made me remember a year prior when Holly said she thought she saw a shadowy dog or something run up the hill towards our house when my headlights splashed across the yard. She was positive she saw something then. Maybe I has just seen something similar?

Which then begs the question: is there some sort of "highway" that goes across my property? Is my house smack dab in the middle of ghost expressway? Is the shit I keep hearing at night now just wayward spirits stopping temporarily on their journey?

The Shadow Person strolls by

I think the first "encounter" that happened in our house after we moved in happened to Shelby and Sophia. But they never even told us about it until a few months ago! I'm guessing it happened some time in 2005. Shelby would have been 7, and Sophia, 6.

At that time on the weekends, Holly and I used to sleep in an extra hour or two in the morning. Shelby was an early riser then, and would wake up about 6am to 7am. She'd wake Sophia up and they would play on the 2nd floor landing just outside our bedroom door. I'd tell them to close my door because they would break out the Littlest Pet Shop and play for a few hours until Holly and I woke up.

As it was told to me by the both of them, one weekend morning a shadow person walked through my bedroom door out onto the 2nd floor landing. It stepped over their toys and passed by them within in inches. It then walked into what was then my office, right across the landing.

They recall craning their necks to look up at the figure as it walked by them. They described it as tall, all black, and with a featureless face.

What freaks me out is how close it was to them.

"Weren't you scared?" I asked them. They both told me no, they weren't.

To be honest I'm not certain why they weren't scared, or why they didn't run immediately into my room after it happened. And I'm not sure why it took them almost a year to tell me. It's possible that because it was morning, i.e daytime, that the environment was not as threatening compared to if it happened during the night.

So the big question is: who is the shadow? Is it a civil war soldier?